ARM Announces Next-Gen Mali GPUs to Deliver Console-Like Graphics

ARM has announced its new series of Mali-T600 mobile GPUs that are touted to deliver "console-like" graphics to devices likes tablets, smartphones and SmartTVs. The company also recently revealed it has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU for OpenCL 1.1 full profile conformance through the standard-setting organization known as Khronos.

The company has already shown its mettle with their quad-core Mali-400 GPU found in the Samsung Galaxy S III. Now, the company has upped the ante by announcing three more GPUs that are the quad-core Mail-T624 and the Mali T628 and Mali-T678, both scalable up to eight cores. These chips are said to deliver at least 50 percent more performance while maintaining the same silicon space and power requirements.

Engadget reported that these new GPUs would be able to run 4k and 8k video resolutions in addition to providing 60 FPS user interfaces on smartphones, smart TVs and tablets. They are also touted to bring console-quality gaming to these devices at the same time.

If such promised graphical performance levels don't suffice to get consumers excited, ARM is attempting to standardize mobile graphics with a new codec called Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). The company has dedicated 2% of mobile GPU's silicon to solely run this new codec. It was submitted to standard-setting organization Khronos as an open source standard, in hope that it will the need for developers to choose "...different codecs to achieve different levels of texture compression for different platforms.". The ultimate goal of ASTC as an open source standard is the elimination of codec fragmentation for texture compression across different devices.